Marie Dumont
CR Cryospheric Sciences
The 2019 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists is awarded to Marie Dumont for outstanding contributions to the field of snow sciences.
Marie Dumont is a rarely talented environmental Earth scientist who is making outstanding contributions to our understanding of the mass and energy budgets of the Earth’s snow, glaciers, and ice sheets. She has extended her scientific interest towards snow surface energy budget with applications to a variety of regions and domains (hydrology, climate, and natural hazards). She is now responsible for the sustained development of the Crocus snow model and for pursuing the implementation of light absorbing impurities radiative effect and their physico-chemical evolution. She is deeply involved in the operational implementation of remote sensing techniques for numerical weather and avalanche hazard prediction, hence transferring fundamental research knowledge for the benefit of the society. Dumont is an autonomous, imaginative, and highly productive researcher, having published 39 articles to date, including 7 as first author. She exhibits impressive aptitudes in theoretical research (radiative transfer, snow modeling), collection of field observations (Alps, Himalaya, Antarctica), and ultimately data assimilation. The spirit of an explorer obviously drives her, with the sustained motivation to develop the remote sensing and modelling tools necessary to provide physical process answers to the pressing questions of our changing cryosphere. One of her most important contributions has been the assimilation of remotely sensed albedo within a numerical snow model, a major step toward improved reconstruction of alpine glacier mass balance. Sharing knowledge is deeply important to her, teaching voluntarily at Université Grenoble-Alpes and at the International Snow Science Winter School. In February 2018, she co-organised this snow science school in the French Alps. To summarise, Marie Dumont is a brilliant early career European scientist with a strong future and generous contributions to snow science and a worthy recipient of the EGU Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientists.